Change, Complexity and
Consciousness:
Complexity Theory as a Challenge to
Critical Realism
Margaret S. Archer
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Globalization and its Challenges
• Social Theory reacted poorly – often not distinguishing
cause and effect
• Empiricist/Actualist: seizing on one SAC element and
extrapolating from changes in it:
– S(tructure) → Global capitalism/ Empire (Negri)
– A(gency) → ‘Institutionalized Individualism’ (Beck)
– C(ulture) → Information/Knowledge Society (Castells)
• Contemporaneously, Complexity Theory developed in
natural science and Social Theory was always a borrower
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Prigogine and Allen
[T]he systems that interest us are large, non-linear systems
operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium. It is precisely
in such systems that coherent self-organization phenomena
can occur, characterized by some macroscopic organization or
pattern, on a scale much larger than that of the individual
elements in interaction. It is a structure whose characteristics
are a property of the collectivity and cannot be inferred from a
study of the individual elements in isolation. (1982:7).
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What is a Self-Organizing System?
• No generally accepted definition
• ‘a self-organizing system is one in which there is no
central locus of information and control. Information
and control are both thoroughly distributed, and
collective behaviour is emergent from the
individualistic dynamics of components in a manner
that produces the illusion of coordinated effort.’ J.T.
Ismael, p. 332.
• Examples used in the literature: turbulent fluids; ANT
colonies; schools of fish; traffic flows, economic
markets
• Social Science is owed an account of HOW and WHEN
the social order became ‘self-organizing’ because
history is of attempts at self-government
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The appeal of Complexity Theory to
some Critical Realists
• With one global social system, the problem of ‘boundaries’
vanished
• CT stresses change, not homeostasis – exit Functionalism
• CT deals with contingency and CR is intrinsically opposed to
determinism
• CT rehabilitated ‘emergence’ [But also, ‘equilibrium’,
‘evolution’ and ‘holism’]
• At the Meta-theoretical level some CR fellow-travellers
argued the CR and Complexity Theory were compatible
(Harvey, Mingers, Urry, Walby)
• AND THE BONUS: the problems of ‘structure and agency’
and of the ‘Micro-Macro link’ were ‘transcended’
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Read the theoretical small print
• In Social Science, ‘complexity theorists’ trade on social
theories that had prepared the way by replacing
STRUCTURES with ‘flows’, ‘waves’, ‘liquidity’
• Endorsing the ‘de-structuration’ of late Modernity
‘Individualization is becoming the social structure of
second modern society itself.’ Ulrich Beck
• SAC is OUT (with different properties and powers of its
elements): Giddens IS BACK & ‘central conflation’ rules
• ‘Self-organization’ is the name of the game. But what
does it presume in Social Theory?
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Clearing the ‘middle ground’
• Self-organization marries Holism (for the system)
and Individualism (for the actors)
• Space between the two is occupied exclusively by
‘networks’
• In the absence of ‘structures’ → ‘Agent-based
modelling’, which ‘solves the micro-macro
problem’
• This presumes that the social order is constituted
by DECENTRALIZED ORGANIZATION alone
• Agency = MONADS, therefore SOCIAL
INTERACTION is examined as self-organizing
CROWD BEHAVIOUR
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Holism(system) plus Individualism (actors)
Source: Christian Fuchs, Internet and Society: Social Theory in the
Information Age, (2008: 52).
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How to turn a ‘heap’ into a ‘whole’
EXAMPLE: ‘market traders’ → ‘finance market’
• 1. Remove structural/cultural contexts of (‘trading’) action,
leaving nothing but crowd behaviour on stock-markets
• 2. Remove relations and relationality and model each
trader as an autonomous monad
• 3. Explain collective behaviour of traders by formula of
‘information + aggregation’
• This is not a ‘power law’ but the power struggles going on
in a Relationally Contested Organization
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Agent –based Market decisions
Source: Luc Neuberg and Koen Bertels, ‘Heterogeneous Trading Agents’
(2003, Complexity, 8:5, Figure 2, p.30).
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Why Human Agents are not ANTS
•
Human action entails CONSCIOUSNESS, REPRESENTATION,
REFLEXIVITY & RELATIONALITY People aspire to be
self-governing systems
•
ANTs work through ‘Stimulus-Response’ and cannot:
– Engage in flexible innovation
– Envisage changes in their habitat
– Collectively mobilize to transform/defend it
•
–
–
–
–
Human actors ALWAYS have to work in:
Circumstances not of their choosing
Because there is no action without a context
Because there is no ‘non-relational’ action
Where reflexivity is now imperative
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Hence the Reflexive Imperative!
• I conclude we have to analyse the social order today as
a Relationally Contested Organization
• Today, as always, it is the resultant of the interplay
between Structure, Culture and Agency because all
action is contextually dependent, concept-dependent,
and agentially-dependent.
• Which is what makes the social order only like itself
• And the faster it changes, the less we can rely upon
routine action, or established norms and practices, but
have to become individually and collectively reflexive.
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In Conclusion
• Change originates in ‘internal perturbations’ deriving from
human ‘concerns’ and ‘projects’ (or is mediated through
them if initiated ‘externally’)
• Means the social order is radically different from any
analogue in the natural order
• As Nicolis & Prigogine acknowledged (1989), the social
order:
[I]s an interplay between the behaviour of its actors and
impinging constraints from the environment. It is here that
the human system finds its unique specificity. Contrary to the
molecules, the actors in a physico-chemical system, or even
the ants or the members of other animal societies, human
beings develop individual projects and desires …
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